Most people think of Easter as a Christian festival, but it is really in name and origin a pagan one. The word "Easter" is the modern form of "Eastra," the name of the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring (in primitive Germanic, "Austro"). The Germans, like ourselves, keep its true pagan name, "Ostern." The Latin nations use for Easter the word Pascha (French, Paque), the Greek form of the Jewish name for the feast of the Passover, with which it is historically associated by the Christian Church. Terrible quarrels have occurred in early ages over fixing Easter Day and its exact relation to the Jewish calendar. This is the explanation of its being "a movable feast" and of the consequent inconvenience to Parliament, schoolboys, and Bank-holiday-makers at the present day. It must be admitted that when Easter comes as early as it sometimes does those who have but the short spring holiday of the Easter week-end are hardly used. Instead of enjoying the sunny spring weather of Austro, and the flowers and the bursting buds which an Easter at the end of April often gives, they have to put up with the dreary chill of arid March, and this, absurdly enough, is all on account of a mistaken attempt at accuracy made by the Church some sixteen hundred or more years ago in trying to bring the Christian festival into line with the Jewish Passover. If it were desired to celebrate the Feast of the Resurrection each year on the day corresponding astronomically with that indicated in the Gospels, the Astronomer Royal would have no difficulty in exactly fixing the day, making due allowance for the changes of the calendar and for the irregularities of the Jewish year. I do not know what day in what month such a calculation would finally establish as that of the ecclesiastical festival, but the Bank Holiday and the Anglo-Saxon Easter might be dealt with separately, and assigned, once for all, to the end of April, the real "opening," or spring month.